The Difficulties of Getting Desterilized

Is sterilization a legal alternative to jail? Can a court require such an operation for a man convicted of nonsupport of his children? And if the man is coerced into submitting to the operation against his will, what if he later wants more children?

Such are the questions facing the California Supreme Court in the case of Miguel Vega Andrade, 44, a Mexican-American whose troubles began when he injured his back, lost his job, and was separated from his wife. Andrade regularly paid $120 out of his $200-a-month medical compensation to help support his four minor children. After two years, Andrade's compensation ceased. Since then, he has been basically supported by his common-law wife, Elma Martello, by whom he has a three-year-old daughter.

Aiding Taxpayers. Shortly before divorcing him last fall, Andrade's first wife charged him with nonsupport. He pleaded guilty, and the county recommended probation. But Pasadena Municipal Court Judge Joseph A. Sprankle took a firmer view: "I am concerned about all the children this man is producing without the ability to support them." He gave Andrade a choice: marriage to Elma Martello and sterilization by vasectomy-or jail.

Andrade reluctantly chose sterile marriage. He got a job washing dishes and resumed payments to his exwife.

Now he wants more children by his new wife, and he seeks to have the vasectomy undone-a feat successful in only about 50% of such cases. No one is more surprised than Judge Sprankle, who says he has "counseled" vasectomy in several hundred nonsupport cases.

Andrade, who is the first to have complained, has roused a legal fuss without precedent in California.

Constitutional Caution. Until recently, eugenic sterilization of misfits was accepted as a social benefit that did not violate the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Speaking for the Supreme Court in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, Mr. Justice Holmes upheld Virginia's sterilization of mental defectives with the classic statement, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" But scientists now consider many human defects to be as much a product of environment as of heredity.

Compulsory sterilization of so-called congenital misfits is thus legally as well as medically debatable. Although 26 states permit such sterilization, they are so cautious in carrying it out that last year's U.S. total was only 467.

Andrade's lawyer, Phill Silver, has petitioned the California Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus on the ground that California law permits only county superior courts to order sterilization, and only for two classes of persons-rapists of young children and state-confined sex degenerates. To Lawyer Silver, at least, a California municipal court judge has no right whatever to place fathers unable to support young children in the same category. Procedure that seemed perfectly proper to Justice Holmes in the '20s, Silver argues, is cruel and unusual punishment in the '60s.

* A' relatively simple operation in which a piece is cut out of the vas deferens, the duct through which male spermatozoa flow from the testes. It causes no change in the physiology of the sex act, merely ensuring that there is no sperm in the male ejaculation.

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